egalitarian human societies. Anthropologists Joe Henrich and Francisco Gil-White argue in an important paper that humans have erected a new system of prestige on top of the more ancient primate system of dominance. Dominants depend upon raw coercive power for their status while the prestigious are granted status as the ablest and best by public opinion. Aung San Suu Kyi has prestige; the Burmese junta that prevents her party from taking power has dominance. Ancestral hunter-gatherer societies were substantially organized by prestige, not dominance. Dominants rightly fear the power of prestige; the Chinese government reacted quite strongly to the prestige accorded by Liu Xiaobo by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. Modern democracy is an attempt to introduce the spirit of egalitarianism and rule by prestige (rather than power) into the operation of complex societies. This attempt runs in the face of history, as complex societies seem to have regularly led to the return of dominance in the human social equation. Yet as Peter Turchin argues in his book Historical Dynamics, elite societies are themselves unstable: authoritarians often promise stability when democracy seems shaky, but it is by no means obvious that authoritarians can in fact deliver. I certainly hope that you are right that by using humanistic and universalist arguments we can draw the sting of nationalism and similar parochial ideologies. This seems essential for moral progress in a world with
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critical global problems to solve. I sometimes think of human life as an adventure. In an adventure, you take risks in hope of ultimate gain. Against the risks, you pit your skill and judgment. Modernity has launched our whole species, willy nilly, upon a great adventure full of risk and uncertainty. Foolish adventurers neglect skill and judgment and trust to luck; either we successfully use Darwin’s tools to progress or we face the luck of natural selection—and we don’t want to evolve by natural selection if we can avoid it! Perhaps we need to remind people about the adventure's fundamentally social nature. As Adam Smith said in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: What are the advantages which we propose by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency and approbation all are the advantages we can propose to derive from it.
Wohlforth: We're wonderfully near to consensus. Your message reads like a very erudite precis of my book, The Fate of Nature, including the attention paid to indigenous cultures and Joe Henrich's work, the issues surrounding the psychology of materialism, and the emphasis on cultural rather than biological evolution. I think I've expressed myself poorly, however, in that you've taken some of what I said to be the